


Self Made

by illegible



Category: Spider-Man (Comicverse), Spider-Man - All Media Types
Genre: Blended Continuity, Canon Revamp, Gen, Origin Stories
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-13
Updated: 2015-12-06
Packaged: 2018-03-17 15:16:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 3,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3534248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/illegible/pseuds/illegible
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Druxy: Something which looks good on the outside, but is actually rotten inside.</i>
</p><p> <i>Ayurnamat: The philosophy that there is no point in worrying about events that cannot be changed.</i></p><p>Eddie Brock and Cletus Kasady were severing ties with humanity long before symbiotes entered the picture. Maybe it was inevitable.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

He looks like the first woman he killed.

Most people don’t know about this, or think about it, or particularly care beyond a passing comment. “You’re just like your mother” shouldn’t read like an accusation. To be fair, it wasn’t usually intended that way. But Eddie Brock doesn’t always want to be fair.

He thinks this is her way of punishing him, and it isn’t even something he can blame her for.

His father never spoke about it. He doesn’t speak much in general, isn’t that kind of man. His face is sharp, his mouth is tight, and his shoulders are drawn low and close to his body. Eddie looks lean like his namesake, but Mary takes after him more. At one year older she doesn’t remember their mom either. It hits her differently, always has.

Mary goes through life in a vague, frustrated mourning for what’s missing. It bothers her to have a pinched nose, narrow lips, and dirty blond hair while Eddie inherited the gold coloring, the soft features, the out-of-place beauty.

These are things she wants that he hates, and she hates that he takes it all for granted. He is a walking, breathing record of the dead but what the world loved about Jamie Brock is a poor fit for her son.

Pretty boys are supposed to attract people. Eddie never has been the right kind of pretty.


	2. Chapter 2

Kasady doesn’t know which parent provided his name, but he’s sure they didn’t like him much. There are plenty of reasons you might ditch your kid next to a dumpster in Greensboro, or Memphis, or Atlanta, or wherever, and there are weirder things to leave than a note that they’re free for the taking. People tend to give funny looks when you charge too much for human beings. But you don’t call a baby _Cletus_ unless you want him to get picked on through middle school.

This was a fate Kasady avoided largely by establishing himself as a last name person early on with the reputation of murdering one or two school janitors. An exaggeration of course, Kasady’s truly believes Mr. Lucas won the lottery and moved to Florida soon after to follow his dream of feeding students to alligators for the rest of his natural life. Or something to that effect. His experience with murder back then was more of a supporting role than an active one.

See, Mrs. Catherine Johnson was a solid foster mom as far as foster moms went. She took Kasady fishing and let him stay up late and shared a scandalous amount of raw cookie dough. Mr. Stuart Johnson was a jackass. So like any sane person, one day Mrs. Johnson had enough and introduced Mr. Johnson to her favorite kitchen knife. It was late and loud and Kasady wandered down in his footie pajamas (the ones with a monster hood, real snarly) to find the place done blood and organ style.

Mrs. Johnson seemed tired, which made sense since it was probably almost four AM. And there was no question the neighbors would be sending some police officers in to keep company. So like any good parent she sat down with him at the breakfast table to eat ice cream until guests arrived.

The two of them talked about a lot of things, like what that squiggly bit over there was and if they taught you to kill people with toothbrushes when you went to prison. They didn’t let him go with her after all, but Mrs. Johnson did give him a kiss on the forehead to say goodbye.

He has no idea where his last name comes from.


	3. Chapter 3

Before Peter was born, visits from the Parkers only meant a sharper division between father and son. They were grown-ups, their conversations were irrelevant and complicated and broke only to offer a smile and some make-believe interest before moving on to more important matters.

It wasn’t that they were bad people, Eddie thought. Just something that had to be endured and behaved for and spoken to with all the courtesy his dad reserved for friends.

The baby changes things.

"You can hold him if you’d like," Mrs. Parker says, dark eyes meeting his with a level of trust he isn’t sure he’d earned. Dr. Brock and Dr. Parker pay no mind, caught up in a debate about money or politics or sacrilegious subjects. This doesn’t concern them.

Peter is a tiny, delicate thing with brown curls. He clings to Eddie’s finger like it’s some prize he won, and his hands are soft but firm. A well-behaved baby who won’t start really chattering for years, when he yawns Eddie catches himself grinning in return.

He doesn’t mind having his day interrupted so much after that. It isn’t embarrassing for Peter to tug at his hair or spit or wiggle and squeal when people blow on his stomach. Talking stupid at Peter doesn’t make him wonder what's wrong with you, it makes him gurgle.

Sometimes it makes him laugh.


	4. Chapter 4

After a certain point, Kasady comes to terms with the fact that he is an ugly child.

It isn’t the worst thing, really. He likes the faint film that comes over his hair when he doesn’t wash it for a couple of days. The color reminds him of clay or rust, but his hands stay unstained as he runs them through. One mom called it a rats nest. Kasady isn’t sure if rats make nests like birds, but he’s had fleas before and he’s pretty sure he’d notice something bigger.

His face is pointy, with a narrow chin and jutting cheekbones. Hazel eyes that are too big for the rest of his face. He’s heard them described as “slightly manic” by a social worker trying to shoo him out fast, “deranged” by the priest hired to exorcise him after his last trip to church.

He always figured he was just a skinny kid with a wide smile, few teeth missing, nothing too weird. But people watching him tend to look kinda disconcerted, try to turn away, shuffle their feet. Stuff like that.

It helps that he’s never been into people. Kasady likes the way mud feels squishing between his toes, toad skin shredding  under nails, chicken bones snapping against teeth. He can swing a screen door back and forth for hours trying to see how many different sounds he can get from it. He’s not interested in competitions or pretend games and he’s not interested in playing nice.

So who cares if he’s ugly?


	5. Chapter 5

Eddie wants to be a journalist when he grows up.

Unfortunately, life doesn't always deliver what we want.

According to his teachers he is a gifted writer. "Gifted", as if something in him had been selflessly given instead of stolen off a corpse. He has a critical eye, an analytical voice. Detail-oriented. Clean. He finds that he likes words and the praises they bring, joins the school paper as soon as he can. His articles become a regular feature.

Dad doesn't read them. A sitter will occasionally, Mary less often (she has more interesting things to do, like compose hipster songs for her guitar), but Dr. Brock is out late. He has a new, Parker-less team of colleagues to lead in biological something-something. Not a subject he can disclose. Dr. Brock snaps more than he smiles and marathons game shows on T.V. every night. Sleeps when he can. Creases are forming over the bridge of his nose.

Eddie offers no comment.

He looks for new ways to stand out, achievements nobody would be able to dispute. When a neighbor kid loses her cat it's Eddie Brock Jr. to the rescue a few days later. He keeps his eyes down as much as he can, avoids rubbing the band-aids covering his hands and arms. Heidi hugs him. He hesitates before he smiles.

Heidi tells everyone he's modest. He thinks to himself that she's the kind of person who would use a term like modest.

In confession, the priest says nothing he doesn't already know. Lying isn't something good people do. Stealing, either. But he’s always been a thief, so there's only so much remorse he can feel.

His father said it was kind.

The soccer team doesn't want him. Football, either. They have reputations to maintain and slow, skinny kids with bad coordination offer nothing.

So Eddie plays the journalist, shows up when new lettermans are delivered. Offers soliloquies about how the team's order got shorted before returning home with a pair of scissors to slice away the embroidered name.

It's too big. He keeps it hidden under his bed for a year before he wears it out. Not at school obviously, but over the weekends, on road trips.

He only starts staying late when Dad starts asking about practice, makes excuses for games. Eddie doesn't know when or how he found out—if the coach was contacted, if someone else saw him, if the act simply failed. But one day when he goes to put the jacket on, it isn't there. 

His father doesn't blink when he tells him he should look after his things.


	6. Chapter 6

Kasady stops counting foster families sooner rather than later, then quickly forgets when he lost count. It isn't because his memory is bad so much as the information wasn't important. Same as how the shirt he wore on his seventh birthday wasn't important. Names, now names might be handy--unfortunately, he really doesn't have a knack in that department. Nicknames come quick and easy enough though, so no big deal.

Caterpillar is a dad whose unibrow is thick and particularly impressive. Stout guy, little red in the face, does great barbecue. Likes to work with his hands and tell people how to be self-sufficient. Alright fella.

Caterpillar's place has a rat problem. Got into the cereal, bowls of fruit. Crapped all over the floors and counters. Poison's no good if there's a kid in the house, so traps it is. Kasady comes to pick them out.

The snappers sound more exciting than glue. Tight-wound, fast, fresh wood and metal cutting through flesh to force it into new shapes.

Kasady keeps news of the first body to himself upon discovery, brushes fingers across matted fur. Prods for bloat that hasn't set in before finding a mouth full of little teeth.

He breaks two incisors off, reaches between the jaws to find a tongue. It pulls tougher than elastic, but tears eventually. There isn't much saliva left and his nails are long so gripping isn't any trouble.

Birds are trickier to catch when he wants something different, but fishhooks and worms work alright. The sparrow is still alive when he takes a hammer to its beak (which breaks like the shell of a particularly stubborn acorn), and the sound it makes sure isn't any kind of song. That chick _shrieks_ , won't stop shrieking for a while yet. The sound is high and honest and raw. Kasady feels as if he's stumbled into some kind of primal secret.

He has to say goodbye to Caterpillar before too long. Guy won't out and say Kasady scares him, makes no accusations, but after he finds a few tiny corpses declares himself a bad fit.

It isn't always so easy to experiment after that. People notice pets too much for Kasady to give them a go--he settles for stray cats and dogs or smaller things. He becomes very familiar with the iron tang of blood in the air, the shift and crush of bones in his fists, how different spots split under a knife.

When he gets stuck in a strict home without wildlife (mom called Puckerface, looks like she has a crippling lemon addiction and hates every second of it), Kasady's mind goes into overdrive. He wants to know what it looks like to cut open the belly of a deer heavy with fawn, wants to fix an actual rabbit's foot to a keychain and wiggle its toes.

He gets to wondering about human beings too, and specifically if his own body is as exciting to work with as anything else.

So he gets himself a knife, sharp and cleanish. Settles on the lip since that spot's got more nerves and sensitivities. Good a place as any.

He slices slow and deep, takes his time to take everything in. His lower lip is slick and red, the upper is on fire and he hears a gross whine building at the back of his throat. He has to stop.

Kasady gets stitches for ending up on the bad end of a dare (he's no snitch--besides it'd wreck the whole lie) and decides he'd rather do to others than have done to him.


	7. Chapter 7

They visit Central Park together. Peter is six by then, already living with his aunt and uncle. Small for his age but rambunctious—Ben Parker’s words. Not Eddie’s. Peter will spill his juice eight times out of ten (he likes grape more than apple), climb over everything and everyone bigger than him, spin together sentence after fumbling sentence so fast nobody can follow. A lisp caused by two missing front teeth doesn’t help, all his ‘s’ sounds blurring into ‘th’.

It’s sunny, on the threshold between spring and summer. Skyscrapers are out of sight here, obscured by willows and white-flowered dogwoods. The pool is clear enough to see the bottom in most spots, small enough to walk around unlike the Meer or lake. Less crowded, too. Its shores are interrupted by jagged boulders you can balance on before fading into grass.

Ben and May are sitting a ways back, side by side on a red beach towel. Their hands rest clasped between them. They don’t pay much attention to Eddie and Peter, but then at fourteen Eddie has babysat plenty of times already. Somehow, they seem to trust him too. Eddie doesn’t know how to thank them properly, wonders if they’d object to any explanation he had to offer. ‘He’s like a brother’ seems almost presumptuous.

Peter perches over the water. On a small rock ahead of him rests a frog no larger than a ping pong ball.

“Rana Kauff…Kauff…Kauffelli,” says Peter. Eddie doesn’t correct his pronunciation, and Peter doesn’t turn. Doesn’t so much as blink behind his glasses. “Mr. Jenkins said it was named after a man who found it a long time ago. Nobody believed him at first, and he died, and they gave his name to the frog.”

“How do you remember that?” asks Eddie, “It’s kind of a mouthful.” He stands a little over Peter at his side, hovering on the edge of a squat. Shade keeps most of the heat off them.

“It’s like dinosaurs,” answers Peter. “Struthyomimus, parasaurolaphus, and pachysephlosaurus only got one name but they’re longer.” Peter pauses, still oblivious to his mistakes. He shifts his feet slightly, furrows his brow. “They’re actually leopard frogs, ‘cause of the spots. See?”

The frog is a small, dull green. Its snout is pointy and there are pale, twin lines running over the ridge of its back. It is, in fact, covered in charcoal covered spots.

There’s a splash as Peter lunges, misses. The frog is on the ground, hopping toward foliage. It takes only a moment to realize Peter’s hands, shirt, and chin are submerged. Eddie manages to half-wrap his arms around Peter’s chest before the kid dunks one of his sneakers, scrambling free onto the dirt. One step. Two. Tiny hands cup over the amphibian and stay there.

Peter looks up, brown eyes wide. There’s mud speckling his shins and his face, but he grins.

It isn’t right for a person like that to be an orphan.


	8. Chapter 8

He’s not popular at St. Estes.

Of course, it’s not like Kasady’s so popular anywhere he goes. An acquired taste, like gasoline smell. A lot of the other boys just stick to themselves, fumble around lost during conversations with him. They’ve all had issues getting picked up by new parents—bad-looking kids, questionable personalities, too old, some story or other. Nothing worth getting torn up about.

Some of them are just shits though. Name-calling and accusations are more likely than getting hit, but a couple try. Nothing takes.

Overall though, St. Estes isn’t a bad orphanage. They let boys pick their own section of bedroom, decorate up, separate living into groups of maybe six, eight kids depending on age. Food’s not terrible either. One of the orphans (black guy only a little older than him, got stuck with braces when he turned twelve) says in books places like this are supposed to have gruel. Kasady has no idea what gruel is, but decides it sounds like the kind of thing grown-ups give you with cough syrup. Estes has classes and supervision and activities funded by the state after cutting most ties with the Catholics. The place looks like a huge, fancy, white-slat house from the outside. Black windows and columns. They practice fire drills and take health class like anyplace else.

Kasady finds himself accused of vandalism pretty often, and honestly the Misters and Misses aren’t wrong. It’s easy to get bored and it’s easy to carve little shapes into desks and doors. He found a screw for that and it was like a birthday present from Jesus himself. Spelling still doesn’t come naturally, but when people start finding CK scrawled here and there it isn’t a big stretch.

The real gift comes around July though. Kasady’s voice is cracking, oily pimples dot his chin, limbs are gettin’ gangly. Everything itchy-sweaty all the time. North Carolina gets hit by a heat wave about then, dry lightning and everything. Power goes out periodically. Some folks use flashlights but the rest go with candles.

Most times, staff try and keep Kasady with the electrical items. Miss Pop switches it up by mistake one night, surrounded by grabby hands and shouty kids. Kasady is one of the older group by then, no one can really _blame_ her for what happens next.

Miss Pop, of course, is not her real name. She’s probably a Betty or a Mary, something common like that. What stands out is she’s plump, round-faced, keeps a dark bun prone to frizzing. Red cheeks. She likes wearing dresses with buttons and tiny shoes.

Miss Pop also likes to cook, and she likes to talk about it. The claim is it’s a little extra education, some home economics for when the boys take off. One weekend she went on about lobster, and how if you heat it up enough air escapes through openings in the shell. Apparently some people think it’s like screaming. She called that needlessly morbid, moved on quickly to review de-shelling and butter dip.

Kasady gets his candle, melts from the crowd and eventually makes his way out through an open window. It doesn’t take long for him to find a beetle making its way across pavement. With a great deal of delicacy and skill he catches it by a leg, suspends it in flame. Beetles don’t pop, as it turns out. Just sizzle.

He goes for a few things after that, blades of grass, sticks, moths, daddy longlegs… none of it bad, but Kasady’s mind keeps on circling back again and again to lobsters and their not-screams.

There’s a pretty sad lack of crustaceans at St. Estes. People make noise though. And maybe if the building acts like a shell, it’ll do something exciting at the right temperature too.

It takes a few days for Kasady to find where they keep the matches, ferreted away in a drawer with child locks he’s long since figured out. Blocking fire exits with furniture, sealing doors, shutting windows, that part is just sneaking. Kasady knows he’s pretty good at sneaking most days anyhow so it’s barely a challenge. He leaves dots of fire behind him as he goes, blooming like weeds on time lapse.

He slips out in the end when people start noticing. There’s no fire drill, no filing out. Pure nature at work.

As it turns out, arson’s only a little like lobsters after all. Wood pops. People scream.


End file.
